Thinking about Systems

I finally blocked out an hour of time and got to watch the Systems DVD from Andy Stanley that I got at CatalystWest a couple months ago. It was a great look at the way church systems don’t always match up with our mission and vision and cause a disconnect between reality and the change we want to see happen.

“If a new leader casts new vision and brings a new sense of mission, but doesn’t develop new systems, then nothing changes.” People will do what the systems reward them for doing, and often we reward behaviors unintentionally that we don’t really want to encourage. He ended with 3 questions to address: What are the behaviors we want to characterize the people in our ministry? What are we doing systemically to reward and motivate those behaviors? What are we accidentally doing to encourage behaviors we don’t want?

I also finished reading Sustainable Youth Ministry the other day. The book digs into what it takes to develop a healthy system for youth ministry that lasts.

Fourth time I’ve started this comment, but it keeps ending up sounding like excuses…

This is an area where I need to do better. Just wrote down a short list of some ministry stakeholders and potential lead team to go through these questions with me. Now to follow up and engage in some climate change.————–Happy Civic Holiday, by the way knotter (or whatever it happens to be called in your part of Canada)!